Hi, I've been out of touch with the latest PC technology for more than a few years. I built my system a while back and have been very happy with it since than. I've been able to play all the games I've wanted at decent resolutions and have had no technical problems beyond the typical. Now I got Starcraft II and am suffering to play it at low settings and figure that this is just as good a time as any for an upgrade.
The system is
AMD X2 4200 (socket AM2)
Gigabyte S5 Motherboard
Nvidia Geforce 7900 GTS (i know it's old)
2GB of RAM, DDR2
My question is If I can only afford to upgrade one part, the CPU or the GPU which one would give me the most benefits in game performance. My automatic assumption is that the GPU would provide the most benefit but the wisdom that I have usually gone with is that a PC will only perform well as well as it's oldest/weakest component.
I was looking at upgrading to something like an Nvidia 450gts and was wondering if that would be an effective upgrade. It is annoying to upgrade the cpu as gigabyte has all but abandoned the S5 and therefore I am stuck with AM2 Cpus not AM2+ or AM3.
What do you think? Will the 450 give me a performance upgrade? Or will it be a futile attempt at bringing an aging system up to speed.
The system is
AMD X2 4200 (socket AM2)
Gigabyte S5 Motherboard
Nvidia Geforce 7900 GTS (i know it's old)
2GB of RAM, DDR2
My question is If I can only afford to upgrade one part, the CPU or the GPU which one would give me the most benefits in game performance. My automatic assumption is that the GPU would provide the most benefit but the wisdom that I have usually gone with is that a PC will only perform well as well as it's oldest/weakest component.
I was looking at upgrading to something like an Nvidia 450gts and was wondering if that would be an effective upgrade. It is annoying to upgrade the cpu as gigabyte has all but abandoned the S5 and therefore I am stuck with AM2 Cpus not AM2+ or AM3.
What do you think? Will the 450 give me a performance upgrade? Or will it be a futile attempt at bringing an aging system up to speed.